A few of you have written to ask me to share my perspective on a newspaper article that has been making the parenting rounds. On March 8, The Wall Street Journal ran an essay titled “Stop Constantly Asking Your Kids How They Feel,” by journalist and author Abigail Shrier. The article is an excerpt from Shrier’s new book Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up, which is now a New York Times bestseller.
It’s tricky to succinctly summarize this article’s main points, because it meanders, but I will try. Shrier argues in her article that it’s bad that parents today check in with their kids about their feelings, because this communicates to our kids that all we care about is their happiness. Also, asking people how they feel typically makes them unhappy, because most of the time we actually are unhappy. Finally, she argues, feelings aren’t trustworthy and we should encourage our kids to suppress their feelings instead.
I am not really sure how to respond to all that as a whole, so I’m going to pick out some tidbits and respond to them with a focus on the science.
I agree with Shrier that focusing on our kids’ happiness can backfire. We shouldn’t try to ensure that our kids feel good all the time; kids learn how to cope with hard feelings and challenges by experiencing them. In other words, for their long-term emotional health, it’s important that our kids experience periods of discomfort and unhappiness and develop healthy emotional coping skills.
But one of the foundations of Shrier’s argument is that emotional check-ins directly communicate to our kids that we think happiness is The Most Important Thing. I don’t think that’s true. I do ask my kids how they feel, but it’s not because I want to eliminate their negative emotions or because my primary goal is for them to be happy. I want my kids to learn to notice and label their emotions because doing so will help them cope with difficult situations and feelings.
This fall, I interviewed Christopher Willard, a psychologist at Harvard Medical School, who explained to me that naming feelings helps to settles down the nervous system. In one brain imaging study, for instance, researchers at UCLA found that putting feelings into words reduces activity in the amygdala and other limbic brain regions associated with emotional reactions.
Put another way, the act of noticing and naming feelings — a foundation of mindfulness — not only probably quells our kids’ emotions, but likely helps them tolerate challenging things more easily. This process is also an essential component of self-compassion, and it helps kids become more compassionate around others, too (I discussed this science in detail in chapter one of my book).
To further bolster the point, research shows that repressing and suppressing feelings, the opposite of acknowledging them, can make people less resilient. In a small clinical trial, researchers asked people to put one of their hands into an ice water bath and to either accept their feelings of pain or to suppress them. Those who tried to suppress their feelings reported more pain and couldn’t endure the ice water for as long as those who accepted their discomfort.
Other research has linked emotional suppression with an increased risk for mental health problems such as depression and anxiety. “What one resists, persists,” said Amanda Shallcross, a naturopathic physician who studies emotion regulation at the Cleveland Clinic, when I interviewed her for an article for The New York Times. My own therapist has advised me to tune into my feelings to avoid avoid rumination and obsessive thoughts, and it works.
Shrier essentially argues the opposite: That encouraging kids to consider and talk about their feelings will worsen their mental health and make them less resilient.
How does she get this so wrong? Among other things, she’s creating a false binary. She paints the picture that there are but two ways for our kids to manage their feelings: Either they can dwell on and ruminate over them — which she says is bad — or they can repress or suppress their feelings, which, she argues, is the better alternative.
“A healthy emotional life involves a certain amount of repression1,” she writes.
Shrier is correct that rumination is not helpful. But the other extreme — repression or suppression — is also not productive (it’s certainly not required, or even recommended, for a “healthy emotional life”). In creating this false dichotomy, Shrier ignores the vast middle ground that involves noticing and acknowledging feelings but not obsessing over them.
In her article, she quotes the psychologist Yulia Chentsova Dutton, who says that “certain kinds of attention to emotions, focus on emotions, can increase emotional distress.” This is true — it definitely is possible to dwell too much on feelings! — but Shrier conflates any attention to emotions with anxious rumination. Noticing, acknowledging and labeling feelings is a cornerstone of healthy emotional regulation and is not the same thing as rumination; not even close.2 This is the kind of exaggerated, unscientific, fear-mongering argument I have come to loathe, which only serves to confuse and shame parents into thinking they’re doing everything wrong.
I haven’t read Shrier’s entire book, but according to a rather acerbic Slate review by Anna Nordberg, this attack on feelings as being “bad” is a common theme. “The problem is how Shrier generalizes, spinning her interviews into an attack on the very idea of teaching kids emotional literacy,” Nordberg writes. Shrier also, apparently, discusses the dangers of school social-emotional learning programs, a popular conservative flashpoint I’ve covered here before, and rails against the dangers of child therapy (which I guess is obvious given the title of the book).
Shrier claims, for instance, that therapists encourage parents to “embrace their children’s despair.” Having interviewed hundreds of child psychologists in my 13 years covering parenting — and with two kids of my own who have spent time in therapy — I must disagree. Cognitive-behavioral therapy, a popular form of therapy for children and teens, has the opposite goal: To help kids overcome unhelpful thoughts and feelings. It seems Shrier’s arguments are rooted more in her own strong negative feelings about feelings than in the scientific research — or in reality.
Shrier seems to use the words “repression” and “suppression” interchangeably, but they are two different things. Repression is an unconscious strategy, whereas suppression involves a conscious effort.
Not to get too into the weeds here, but for those of you who read the WSJ article, Shrier not only confuses emotional regulation with rumination, but she also seems to confuse emotional regulation with emotional suppression when she talks about the benefits of having an “action orientation.” She characterizes an action orientation as involving emotional suppression, but the research instead describes it as involving rapid emotional regulation.
I have so many thoughts...and some of them are not polite. I think you have done a beautiful job of challenging some of the main issues with the article. And my biggest concern with this as you said is the confusion and fear it creates for parents. It plays right into the fact that many parents have become frustrated with gentle parenting and it goes into a very different direction that is very unhelpful and potentially damaging for families.
I have not read this woman’s book or WSJ article, but it strikes me more than anything as a performance: “Look at me! I’m conservative!” And a ham-handed one at that. I mean, feelings are bad? Um…? Sounds like someone who enjoys thinking of herself as tough and no-nonsense, writing for other people who feel the same way and will read this book as a way to indulge in self-regard because it feels good.